Category Archives: New Urbanism

How cars conquered the American city (and how we can win it back) Two quotes from the article by Henry Grabar: John Massengale and I are standing in the middle of 1st Avenue at East 4th Street, in New York’s … Continue reading →

COLUMBIA ARCHITECTURE PROFESSOR and architectural historian Ken Frampton was once asked about “the cult of New Urbanism.” It’s “ersatz kitsch colonialism for the modern middle class”, he said. Faced with a statement like that, what can one do except write … Continue reading →

The Berkshire Record only puts their front page online, so here is a copy of their recent article about the two streets in Great Barrington, Massachusetts that are discussed in Street Design. Click on either of the images below to … Continue reading →

These two photos of Lexington Avenue at 89th Street show that one-hundred years ago the sidewalks of Lexington Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan were two to three times as wide they are now. The photo on the … Continue reading →

THE ARCHITECTURE CRITIC for New York magazine wrote about the work of Robert A.M. Stern in an article entitled Unfashionably Fashionable. I commented: “There are two kinds of music,” Duke … Continue reading →

A YEAR OR SO AGO, I was invited to take part in a discussion on Traditional and Modern architecture at theglasshouse.org that was framed like this: Traditional versus modern architecture; Proponents of traditional architecture cite a preference for historical styles. Modernist … Continue reading →

CitiField has no city, and the Metropolitans have no metropolis. OVER AT DESIGN OBSERVER, the great Michael Bierut wrote a good piece on baseball parks that I thought was a little too quick to equate traditional design with “nostalgia” while … Continue reading →

When the richest team in baseball asks New York City and New York State for $300 million to stay in a place they would never leave (they are the Bronx Bombers, after all, about to set an all-time major league … Continue reading →

These are the plans referred to in the post above. They were designed by architecture students at the University of Miami in 1998. Click on the plans for larger images. From that post, Yankees To Ask New York For $300 … Continue reading →